NEED FOR COUNTING MICROORGANISMS IN SOIL MINERAL CYCLES

Growth of bacteria in natural habitats tends to be much slower than under optimum laboratory conditions. Never-the-less, the ″quantum of action″ is the rate of metabolism per microbe and in order to understand rates of reactions of elements undergoing oxidation or reduction in soil one needs to know the number of each kind of relevant organism in a unit volume through which such elements as nitrogen and sulfur are undergoing translocation. Such information allows one to give real values to parameters in mathematical models for these systems.